Portland JSU students hung up a poster with the stories of Holocaust victims.
Across the world, NCSY remembered the Holocaust.
In Baltimore, NCSYers joined a Shabbat afternoon program at the Ner Tamid synagogue with elderly Holocaust survivors. NCSYers sat with the survivors in small groups and listened to their stories. Afterwards, the teens led an NCSY ebbing.
“The teens got to hear the miraculous stories of survival,” explained Rabbi Rocky Caine. “That’s the most direct way to understand Yom HaShoah.”
Portland NCSY Director Meira Spivak ran an interactive Holocaust program in her eight JSU Clubs. Each student took a bio of a Holocaust victim and told classmates about the particulars of that person’s life while holding a yartzeit candle.
“The point of the program is to make teens feel more connected to the Holocaust and make them feel as if they know someone who died in the Holocaust,” said Spivak. The biographies were then attached to a bulletin board and hung outside the classroom.
Atlanta NCSY helped staff a memorial service for Holocaust survivors at the Jewish Federation of Greater Atlanta. In Seattle, NCSYers helped staff a range of memorial activities.
Rabbi Chaim Neiditch with participants of March of the Living outside Birkenau.
“Teens volunteered at multiple events in a variety of capacities ranging from photographers, to ushers, to participating in candle lighting ceremonies,” said Ari Hoffman, director of Seattle NCSY.
Rabbi Chaim Neiditch, director of Atlanta NCSY, wasn’t in Atlanta on Yom HaShoah. Instead he was on March of the Living, a program that takes high school students to the sites of the genocide in Europe. He spent the day in Auschwitz and Birkenau with students from the Atlanta JSU and Yeshiva Atlanta.
“It’s been an incredible experience,” Rabbi Neiditch explained. “I am transitioning the focus for my teens from ‘Never Again’ to taking action through personal observance to ensure the Jewish people remain Jewish.”